A/N: Smallville and all its associated characters belong to the relevant people. I just love to write about them.
Chapter One:
They seemed to gain a special kind of pleasure just from hearing him scream. She watched them as they used kryptonite to peel the skin from his bones, gather tissue samples to scrutinise beneath their high powered microscopes, extract blood, bone marrow, anything that they wanted. It was gruesome, nightmarish and she took a silent deep breath, swallowing against the rising bile in her stomach. As always, she wrote the necessary information down whilst remaining in the background. She was so unobtrusive that they tended to forget about her and that was exactly how she preferred it. She observed and she detailed down information, information that would be expected to be compiled into a concise detailed report as soon as possible and this she did. All the while her brain catalogued an entirely different story.
She was the only one left in the room now. She walked towards him. He was tethered to a long metal table, the manacles around his wrists and ankles infused with an eerie green glow. Kryptonite, his one weakness. They weren't stupid enough to give him too much, just enough to make him compliant enough to allow them to carry out their experimentation. She knew and they knew that the radiation had to be slowly killing him. The rock glowed in his presence; it's radioactive properties activating something, proteins maybe, in his blood. A big enough single dose would kill him. She looked at his face and saw the drying tear tracks out of the corner of each eye. They were closed, his face partially turned towards her but she couldn't miss the greyish pallor that blemished his face, nor the dark shadows bruised beneath his eyes. He was tall, powerfully built with long legs, broad shoulders and arms all corded with what was once thick muscle. She imagined that at full strength he would be quite an intimidating sight to behold. She looked down at the length of his body and she frowned at the marks their experiments had left on him – cuts, bruises, and grazes. There were old scars there that were slow to heal from past research. It looked barbaric. The skin around the manacles that held him were the worst; the skin was red raw, burned and bleeding. She took a deeper breath this time and went to fill a bowl with warm water. Using some discarded gauze, she set about to try and clean his injuries. The water quickly turned red, but she worked on, quickly and efficiently. She wished that she could just whisk him out of here but for now this was all that she could offer him. She tried to make his wrist wounds more comfortable, smoothed some antiseptic lotion she'd found into them and she wondered whether he was aware of what she was doing or even if it would work. She touched his long fingers and felt them move slowly around hers. It startled her and then saddened her, he barely had the strength to respond, but he had done all the same.